Chapter 2
Chapter Two
Livia
Now . . .
The next time I wake, the room is wrong.
Not just different.
Wrong.
The air tastes cleaner. The ceiling is higher. The curtains are pale and expensive in a way no hospital has ever managed without also charging three thousand dollars for a Tylenol. Someone has washed my hair. I smell almond, cream, and a stranger’s careful hands.
A window is cracked open. The landscape looks . . . new, different. Not New York, not Boston. . . not even Connecticut.
Bells ring somewhere beyond it.
I lie there for a long time before I let myself understand what that means.
I'm not in the same hospital.
I'm not close to home. What is this? California?
Not sure, but I feel their absence. I'm not close to Halston or Creed.
The names move through me, and grief follows so fast I can’t separate one from the other.
Halston.
Creed.
They should be here.
That’s what people do when they belong to each other. They sit in terrible chairs while you’re mangled.
They drink terrible coffee. They argue with nurses. They learn the schedule for medication rounds. Creed would know the name of every doctor by now and hate all of them equally. Halston would stand near the door and say almost nothing while terrifying everyone into competence.
They should be here.
Then I remember my father’s last words: Critical condition.
Halston is in critical condition.
Somewhere.
I don’t know where.
I don’t know if he’s alive. Did he make it? When was the accident? Yesterday? Maybe last week. I’ve been in and out of consciousness so many times, I don’t know what day it’s today.
Creed would tell me if he were here, but he’s not. He should be here if Halston can’t . . . but he’s not.
That thought breaks something.
I turn my face into the pillow and cry as quietly as I can, which is ridiculous, because if there were ever a situation that justified dramatic sobbing, it is waking up in a strange hospital with partial hand betrayal and missing husbands.
Still, I cry quietly.
Old habits. Mom would hate it. She always says that good girls don’t make people uncomfortable with their pain. Good girls make charts. Good girls say thank you to nurses and apologize for needing bedpans. Good girls don't scream into soft pillows about the men they married in secret.
The door opens.
I stop crying.
My mother stands there.
She looks like my mother and not my mother at all. Smaller somehow. Worn down. Her hair is pulled back, but pieces have escaped around her face. Her cardigan hangs open. Her eyes go wet the second she sees mine open.
“Hi, baby,” she says.
Baby.
I am twenty-two years old, married to two men, possibly widowed in one direction and abandoned in another, and my mother still says “baby” as if she can bring me back by naming who I used to be.
“Hi, Mom,” I say.
My voice sounds like it belongs to someone who survived something I haven’t been briefed on.
She comes to the bed.
Sits.
Reaches for my hand.
The right one.
She doesn't hesitate. She doesn't look at the left hand. She doesn’t even glance that way with the tense awareness of someone avoiding a wound.
She simply chooses the hand she knows will respond.
I watch her do it.
I watch my mother take my right hand without thinking, and in the four seconds it takes her to settle on the edge of the mattress, I understand something that makes the room go very far away. Mom has been here for a while.
Long enough to learn which hand is safe to touch.
Long enough to build muscle memory around a daughter who has not been awake to notice.
Long enough that her body knows mine differently now.
“How long has it been?” I ask.
Her face changes.
“Livia—”
“How long, Mom?”
She looks at our joined hands.
Then back at me.
“Three months.”
The words enter me without sound.
Three months?
That doesn’t make sense. That is too long. Too impossible. Three months is: seasons shifting. Three months is bills paid, rooms emptied, lives rearranged. It is enough time for people to change passwords, redirect mail, decide who learns what, who gets access, who gets erased.
Three months is enough time to steal a life. Mine . . . I pull in a breath.
It hurts.
Everything hurts.
I almost welcome it, because pain is information, and information is better than the blank spaces they have apparently been filling without me.
“Where am I?”
“A clinic outside Zurich,” Mom says too quickly, as if rehearsed. “They specialize in cases like yours. Head injuries, trauma recovery, neurological rehabilitation. A friend from Wellesley knew the director. When things became complicated in Westchester, your father and I—”
“Westchester?”
Her fingers tighten around mine.
“You were treated there first.”
“Where’s Halston?”
She stops.
Just like every time I’ve asked . . . well, for months apparently.
My mother has never been good at lying to me. She is good at hosting, fundraising, remembering birthdays, and making grief look tasteful in public. But lying to me? No. I have been translating her pauses since I was old enough to understand that families say everything except the truth.
“Mom.”
She smooths her thumb over my knuckles.
“Honey, there is a lot you don’t remember.”
“I’m aware. It’s giving me a lovely sense of mystery and total emotional collapse. Where is Halston?”
Her eyes fill again.
“The last I heard, he’s in a long-term care facility in Connecticut.”
The room goes silent inside me.
“Has he asked for me?”
She doesn’t answer.
I know.
I know before she says it.
“He hasn’t regained consciousness since the accident,” she says. “His family has asked, very gently, that we respect their privacy during this time.”
His family.
Very gently.
Privacy.
Three phrases that don't belong anywhere near Halston unless someone is holding a knife behind their smile.
I stare at her.
“My husband is in a care facility,” I say, each word scraped raw, “and his family asked you to respect their privacy? I should be there. I’m his next of kin.”
My mother blinks.
Once.
Twice.
Not enough.
Not the way she would blink if she knew what I had said.
“What did you say?”
My pulse moves faster.
“My husband?” I ask, then add, “Or next of kin?”
Her face empties.
“Oh, sweetheart.” Her voice turns soft in a way that makes me want to tear the IV from my arm. “I know you were very close to him. You liked him, but he never . . .”
Very close?
I liked him?
He never . . .
She says it the way someone might say “study partner.”
“Mom—”
“The doctors said you’ll have memory problems, but making up stories—” She begins to sob.
She says something that sounds close to “childhood friend.” Then, “the boy you loved too much before life became hard.”
Not husband.
Not one-half of my heart.
Not the man whose ring I wore against my skin when we couldn’t risk anyone seeing it.
For a bit, she makes me believe that I imagined it all.
That everything I lived with Creed and Halston was just a dream.
I look at my left wrist where the trinity knot tattoo is.
That’s when it starts. A tremble. No, more like a rolling, disobedient movement that begins in my wrist and runs through every finger.
My mother reaches over and covers it, smoothing the blanket down, covering the movement with her palm without missing a breath.
It’s as if she has done this before.
Yes, I suddenly remembered that. It’s happened so many other times. As I recall that, the memory of what happens when I panic hits me. They’ll sedate me. I have to remain calm. I can’t afford to lose more time. I have to recover and find a way to get to Hal and . . . where is Creed?
“Your father has spoken with the Saint Claires’ attorney,” Mom interrupts my plans. “Everything is being handled. They’re paying for most of your medical expenses since the accident report indicated Halston was driving while impaired.”
She presses her lips together for a moment and says, “We promised not to press charges.”
Charges? What in the world is she talking about? None of this makes sense. Why would we press charges? Then it hits me all at once, the Saint Claires are doing what they do best. They’re using their wealth to twist everything in the way that is most convenient.
“No,” I snap, then remember I have to stay calm.
“No,” I say again, this time more neutrally. “He wasn’t drunk.”
“Honey—”
“He wasn’t.”
I remember Halston’s hand on the wheel.
His jaw tight, discussing how we needed to leave the country for a few days.
Creed’s voice on the speaker, low and furious, saying, “Don’t go there without me. I have a game. We should hire security.”
I remember the rain.
Headlights.
Halston saying my name.
He wasn’t drunk. We were heading to a private tamarac. Not drunk, but angry and scared.
Protective.
But not drunk.
Now that I’ve regained enough consciousness, the story seems to have changed. There are lawyers involved and Creed. Will he be able to fix this before it’s too late?
My mother’s face folds into pity, and I hate that too. Pity is worse than disbelief. Disbelief argues. Pity tucks you into a smaller version of your own life and calls it care.
She inhales. “You have a serious head injury. The doctors said memory can return in fragments, and sometimes those fragments feel—”
“Don’t.” My voice cuts out, then comes back thinner. “Do not explain my own mind to me with medical brochure language.”
Her mouth trembles.
Guilt hits me, fast and awful.
Even now.
Even lying in a clinic outside Zurich, not knowing where one husband’s body is being kept or why the other has not come for me, I still can’t stop managing my mother’s feelings.
Truly inspiring. Put it on my tombstone: Here lies Livia. Even during neurological recovery, she remained emotionally available to everyone except herself.
I close my eyes.
Open them again.
“And Creed.”
My mother’s confusion is instant.
“Creed?”
“Lafontaine,” I add, hoping that’d help.
“Sweetheart, why are you asking about—”
“Has he called?”
Her face gives me the answer before her mouth can ruin me with it. She’s hiding something.
“Called you?” She looks at me, almost horrified. “Who is this Creed Lafontaine? You don’t know anyone with that name.”
“I do,” I argue. “I do know him.”
“No one has called you. You haven’t been able to take calls. The clinic has been screening everything.”
“Has he tried?”
“I don’t think—”
“Mom.”
She swallows.
“I don’t think this person would have any reason to—”
“Has anyone called for me?” I ask. “Anyone.”
“Livia.”
“In three months?”
“Honey, you need rest.”
“Three months,” I say, and my voice breaks on the number. “No one?”
She looks down.
My left hand betrays me again beneath her palm.
The tremor rolls through my fingers, small and horrible and mine.
She smooths it without looking, still speaking in that soothing mother’s voice: telling me I’ve been brave, telling me the doctors are pleased, telling me my father is at a hotel in the city, and my brother flew in last week, and everything has been arranged.
Of course it has.
That is what rich families do when the truth becomes inconvenient. They arrange. They soften. They redirect. They write checks, issue statements, and hire attorneys who say “privacy” as if it is a virtue instead of a locked door.
I lie there and watch my mother’s hand cover the broken rhythm of mine.
Three months of my life . . . gone.
Halston in a care facility in Connecticut. Creed nowhere around. The scary part is the Saint Claires asking for privacy, and everyone listening.
None of this feels like an accident anymore.
Maybe the crash was.
Maybe it wasn’t.
But the three months afterward?
No.
There are pieces I only understand in flashes. A private clinic. A nurse who stops talking when I turn my head. Words like confidentiality. Family request. High-profile patient. Privacy.
Always privacy.
The Saint Claires don’t have to chain me to a bed to keep me hidden. They only have to keep paying the right people to lower their voices, close the blinds, and call it care.
Someone took the fact that I could not wake up and built a wall around me with money, medicine, distance, and fake concern.
Someone put Halston where I couldn’t reach him.
Maybe someone made sure Creed couldn’t reach me.
Someone decided the three of us were easier to dismantle if no one admitted we were three at all.
I close my eyes so my mother won’t see what is in them. So she doesn’t decide that I need to be sedated again for days because I can’t be trusted while awake.
I keep them closed for a long time.
When I open them again, I am still in a clinic outside Zurich.
My body is still broken in ways I don't understand. My mother is still holding the wrong hand because it has become the right one. Halston is an ocean away in a room I can’t picture without wanting to scream.
Creed is somewhere beyond the clean little lies everyone keeps handing me.
And I have no phone.
No proof.
No access.
No idea who decided love could be erased by paperwork and distance.
Only this:
I am awake now, and I won’t let them silence me again.